During the Vortex 2016 kickoff, Jenny Roe, an environmental psychologist, urban designer, and landscape architect who studies the interaction between humans and the spaces they inhabit, opened our eyes to thinking about the health of the space in terms of the health of those who use it. We sat down with Jenny to talk about how design can encourage people to make different decisions as well as what role the University population can have in supporting the redevelopment of the area.

We measured the length of Preston Avenue for the Vortex site and it is only slightly longer than half of a mile, how would you encourage people to see this as a feasible walking distance and not one that requires a car?

If you make the route that people are walking intriguing, time concepts disappear; you know this yourself when you’re walking around an art gallery or investigating a new city for the first time. Time flashes by. So if you can make that route really interesting in terms of the activities people can engage with as they’re walking through it, then time and mileage becomes irrelevant. If you’re downtown, I mean, the downtown mall is what, half a mile long? But you know time flies by when you’re walking down it because there’s a lot going on. There’s music, there are people with dogs, there are chalkboards, so that’s the key, I think, having edge activities and workshops which people can see what’s going on inside. I always think of Copenhagen in terms of sustainability and walkability. When you walk through the streets of Copenhagen, you can see down into people’s basements, and you can see what’s going on. That’s really fascinating, so I think that’s the real key.

How would you suggest we look at this area to be something that is always busy? How do you excite people to want to live all parts of their life here?

So again, I think there are good models with that. I mean it’s obvious that we need mixed use developments on that site, and we need to connect places if you want people to use that space on the weekend. You have to think about cultural facilities, like film and theater. I also think that you need to go beyond the edge and look what’s in the neighborhood. So there’s Venable Elementary School, there’s the library, there’s the residential care center for older people, how are you going to tease those people to come and use this stretch on the weekend and at night. You have to make it safe, but you also have to be creative and to think about lighting. How are you going to create a creative ambiance in the evening, when it’s dark? There are some great examples, some great precedents of James Turell, to use lighting to create ambiance at night. I don’t think we think about that in terms of urban design enough and I walked there last night, and it was quiet. I think you need to make it safe and what makes places safe are people. So it’s about getting more people out onto the streets day and night really.

This area is located near grounds, but isn’t necessarily a place where people think to go from the University, how do you think we can put this location into people’s minds as a place to be?​I think the key is to get to downtown, via that area. You might stop and you might not go any further. Some days you might go further, but just see it as a different way to get downtown, to see it as another kind of route to get you where you want to go. There are going to be things along that route that will engage you and maybe stop you from going any further that’s how I see students engaging in that space.

As students, most of us have not grown up or existed in this site for long periods of time. How can we healthfully impact a neighborhood in which we don't necessarily have a stake?

So that’s the challenge of Vortex. Normally in this process you would do a huge amount of participatory consultation with people in that neighborhood. I was talking yesterday about empathy and the need to kind of really inquire very deeply about into what that neighborhood means to people. Unfortunately given the time scale, you are left to the resources you can find on the internet and talking to people maybe in the neighborhood going into shops and things asking people what they think. Truly you’ve got to try to get yourself into the perspective of someone who lives there, and that requires quite a bit of imagination and it requires you thinking across different demographics. I appreciate there is an issue of racial segregation there, but it’s not just about trying to solve that problem. It’s about catering to a whole host of different users needs. The community knows best, what’s best for it. Unfortunately there isn’t much time to engage to community, but you, through your work, have got some of that understanding. It’s applying what you might have studied previously in relation to user needs and participatory planning in Charlottesville. This isn’t the first community project students have done I’m assuming, so it’s applying your knowledge in the most imaginative way you can think.